Does anybody have a suggestion? The Teenage Liberation Handbook comes to mind, as my oldest is rapidly approaching teenagerhood. Also, we aren’t unschoolers, so I think the unschooling perspective would be good for me.

At the heart of any school reforms that aren?t simply tuning the mudsill mechanism lie two beliefs: 1) That talent, intelligence, grace, and high accomplishment are within the reach of every kid, and 2) That we are better off working for ourselves than for a boss. But how on earth can you believe these things in the face of a century of institution-shaping/economy-shaping monopoly schooling which claims something different?

What makes us different? Why do such a small percentage of us see this and act on it?

Here is the crux of the dilemma: modern schooling has no lasting value to exchange for the spectacular chunk of living time it wastes or the possibilities it destroys. The kids know it, their parents know it, you know it, I know it, and the folks who administer the medicine know it. School is a fool?s bargain, we are fools for accepting its dry beans in exchange for our children.

And yet so few are willing to do something about it. Did they really do that good of a job of killing off self reliance? Are people just lazy?

If you can keep your kid out of any part of the school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first, second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of the damage is done. If you can manage that, they?ll be okay.

I both agree and disagree with Gatto here. Certainly, schools kills the basic instinct for self education in the first and second grade. There is simply no other explanation for how kids teach themselves to walk and talk before age 4, yet become almost feeble minded by 2nd or 3rd grade, completely unable to do anything without explicit direction from an authority figure.

However, the Lord of Flies world that is junior high is at least as destructive. I’m not sure that even the most exceptional of kids will have the internal fortitude to avoid the corrosive effects of the American Junior High School. I say you have to keep them out the system until about age 14. I think most home educated kids will be able to survive high school if necessary. Although I suspect most of them by that time would rather be dipped in honey and dropped on a fire ant hill, over being subjected to school after 14 years of thriving without it.

And now Gatto provides his ultimate solution.

If we closed all government schools, made free libraries universal, encouraged public discussion groups everywhere, sponsored apprenticeships for every young person who wanted one, let any person or group who asked to open a school do so?without government oversight?paid parents (if we have to pay anyone) to school their kids at home using the money we currently spend to confine them in school factories, and launched a national crash program in family revival and local economies, Amish and Mondragon style, the American school nightmare would recede.

The only thing I would add is that we absolutely cannot pay anybody with public funds. Return the tax money to the parents and let them use it as they see fit.

Gatto acknowledges that the above will never happen , and provides the basic summary of his next book, how to go to school and still get an education. Interestingly, his prescription has a lot in common with the “community as one big community college” model of education I have discussed on occasion. He essentially recommends de-professionalizing education by getting out of the schools and into the real world. No standards, no oversight, no mandatory anything. Unleash millions of bright inquisitive minds on their particular worlds, and let a million seeds bloom.

He also recommends:

• Elimination of standardized tests as sorting tools
• Elimination of school boards and forcing control to the lowest possible level – parents controlling their voluntarily associated local schools.
• Get kids out of the schools and into the real world as much as possible. Presumably this requires more than an annual take your kid to work day.
• Eliminate the constant surveillance and tracking of kids. I might ass they can also do away with it for adults.
• Break the teacher monopoly so that anybody with something of value to teach can do it.

The final word, appropriately, goes to Gatto.

One-system schooling has had a century and a half to prove itself. It is a ghastly failure. Children need the widest possible range of roads in order to find the right one to accommodate themselves. The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody. Tax credits, vouchers, and other more sophisticated means are necessary to encourage a diverse mix of different school logics of growing up. Only sharp competition can reform the present mess; this needs to be an overriding goal of public policy. Neither national nor state government oversight is necessary to make a voucher/tax credit plan work: a modicum of local control, a disclosure law with teeth, and a policy of client satisfaction or else is all the citizen protection needed. It works for supermarkets and doctors. It will work for schools, too, without national testing.

It’s a lot of material, so I’m going to break it up into two posts. This post covers the problem, hopefully neatly summarized into a few paragraphs, and then I’ll do another post to cover Gatto’s solutions.

During the industrial revolution, American business leaders became acutely aware of the need for a steady supply of factory workers to man the rapidly growing industrial infrastructure of the US. Unfortunately for them, the typical man in the US at the time was a farmer or sole proprietor that had no interest in giving up self sufficiently for a regular paycheck. In fact, back then, a job was something you did maybe for a few months during the winter when the farm was dormant, or it was something you did when young to learn a trade that would enable self sufficiency. If you worked for somebody else long term you were generally considered a failure.

The intent was not malicious. Like all classical liberals, these folks truly believed that they were smarter than the common man and were in a position to help us by providing secure jobs in their great factories. If only they could get us off the farm…

School was how they did it. By breaking the early family bond where the values of self sufficiency and family were naturally passed on, the business community, with the support of the government, was able to wipe out the tenant of self sufficiency in about one generation.

If you can detach yourself from the horror of it all for just a moment, it’s really a remarkable achievement in mass behavioral change.

Gatto summarizes all this in nine major assumptions that must be acknowledged as false if you hope to rise above the mediocrity of forced schooling and achieve true education.

1) Universal government schooling is the essential force for social cohesion. There is no other way. A heavily bureaucratized public order is our defense against chaos and anarchy. Right, and if you don?t wipe your bum properly, the toilet monster will rise out of the bowl and get you.

2) The socialization of children in age-graded groups monitored by State agents is essential to learn to get along with others in a pluralistic society. The actual truth is that the rigid compartmentalizations of schooling teach a crippling form of social relation: wait passively until you are told what to do, never judge your own work or confer with associates, have contempt for those younger than yourself and fear of those older. Behave according to the meaning assigned to your class label. These are the rules of a nuthouse. No wonder kids cry and become fretful after first grade.

3) Children from different backgrounds and from families with different beliefs must be mixed together. The unexamined inference here is that in this fashion they enlarge their understanding, but the actual management of classrooms everywhere makes only the most superficial obeisance to human difference?from the first, a radical turn toward some unitarian golden mean is taken, along the way of which different backgrounds and different beliefs are subtly but steadily discredited.

4) The certified expertise of official schoolteachers is superior in its knowledge of children to the accomplishments of lay people, including parents. Protecting children from the uncertified is a compelling public concern. Actually, the enforced long-term segregation of children from the working world does them great damage, and the general body of men and women certified by the State as fit to teach is nearly the least fit occupational body in the entire economy if college performance is the standard.

5) Coercion in the name of education is a valid use of State power: compelling assemblies of children into specified groupings for prescribed intervals and sequences with appointed overseers does not interfere with academic learning. Were you born yesterday? Plato said, “Nothing of value to the individual happens by coercion.”

6) Children will inevitably grow apart from their parents in belief, and this process must be encouraged by diluting parental influence and disabusing children of the idea their parents are sovereign in mind or morality. That prescription alone has been enough to cripple the American family. The effects of forced disloyalty on family are hideously destructive, removing the only certain support the growing spirit has to refer to. In place of family the school offers phantoms like “ambition,” “advancement,” and “fun,” nightmare harbingers of the hollow life ahead.

7) An overriding concern of schooling is to protect children from bad parents. No wonder G. Stanley Hall, the father of school administration, invited Sigmund Freud to the United States in 1909?it was urgent business to establish a “scientific” basis upon which to justify the anti-family stance of State schooling, and the programmatic State in general.

It is not appropriate for any family to unduly concern itself with the education of its own children, although it is appropriate to sacrifice for the general education of everyone in the hands of State experts. This is the standard formula for all forms of socialism and the universal foundation of utopian promises.

9) The State is the proper parent and has predominant responsibility for training, morals, and beliefs. This is the parens patriae doctrine of Louis XIV, king of France, a tale unsuited to a republic.

Gatto sees hope for the future though. He sees hope in unabashed capitalism that defines Silicon Valley. As somebody who has rode the Internet wave since it was a ripple in 1996, I can assure you that the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley only goes so far. Dangle a $2 million government contract in front of a SV entrepreneur he’ll latch on to the government teat so fast it’ll make your head spin.

It can only be a matter of time before America rides on the back of the computer age into a new form of educational schooling once called for by Adam Smith, that and a general reincorporation of children back into the greater social body from which they were excised a century and more ago will cure the problem of modern schooling

We’ll see, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

This was the paragraph that pushed me over the edge and killed my will to continue.

By the end of 1999, 75.5 million people out of a total population of 275 million were involved directly in providing and receiving what has come to be called education. And an unknown number of millions indirectly. About 67 million were enrolled in schools and colleges (38 million in K-8, 14 million in secondary schools, 15 million in colleges,) 4 million employed as teachers or college faculty (2 million elementary; 2 million secondary and college combined), and 4.5 million in some other school capacity. In other words, the primary organizing discipline of about 29 percent of the entire U.S. population consists of obedience to the routines and requests of an abstract social machine called School.

The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.

We were warned a long time ago…any man that trades freedom for security deserves neither. Government provided education that promises a good job and secure future, government managed retirement that promises a secure future, government managed health care that promises a secure future. It all ties together nicely, eh?

Unfortunately for us, none of those promises can be kept.

None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren?t aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.

We also didn’t realize that the regular corporate paycheck wasn’t going to be regular.

Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises?no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do “creative” work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.

Interestingly, Daniel Pink writes in his new book that now is the time that the creative class will rise. His theory is that all the mundane production and technical work can and will be outsourced. All that will be left is creative work.

Although plenty went wrong with the national experiment in forced schooling, nothing was as damaging as this.

Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago about the powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his “infinite delight” with Spenser?s Faerie Queen?an epic poem that treats moral values allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure with its “Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses.” Cowley was twelve at the time. It couldn?t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it?s beyond the reach of many elite college graduates today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened. “Frank had a dog. His name was Spot.” That happened.

I’m constantly amazed at what my kids teach themselves from books. It should go without saying that they didn’t learn to read the “school way”.

Gatto also touches on the future a bit. The underclasses have been sold a bill of goods. A college degree isn’t really worth that much either. The working class is starting to realize that 16 years of school was just a way to keep us busy and keep us under control.

What happens if we decide to revolt?

To understand how this happens, you have to grok the nature of bureaucracies. It’s not personal.

The sensationalistic charge that all large corporations, including school corporations, are psychopathic becomes less inflammatory if you admit the obvious first, that all such entities are nonhuman.

All large bureaucracies, public or private, are psychopathic to the degree they are well-managed. It?s a genuine paradox, but time to face the truth of it. Corporate policies like downsizing and environmental degradation, which reduce the quality of life for enormous numbers of people, make perfectly rational sense as devices to reach profitability.

The hierarchical nature of large bureaucracies is what allows these institutions, comprised of people, to ultimately make completely inhumane decisions.

Michel wrote in Political Parties that the primary mission of all institutional managers (including school managers) is to cause their institution to grow in power, in number of employees, in autonomy from public oversight, and in rewards for key personnel. The primary mission is never, of course, the publicly announced one. Whether we are talking about bureaucracies assigned to wage war, deliver mail, or educate children, there is no difference.

In 1911, a prominent German sociologist, Robert Michel, warned in his book Political Parties that the size and prosperity of modern bureaucracies had given them unprecedented ability to buy friends. In this way they shield themselves against internal reform and make themselves impervious to outside reform.

Ever notice how every government reform project, whether it be the schools, the postal system, the Pentagon, or the Dept. of Fisheries, leaves the reformed organization bigger and less efficient than before? It has to be by design. Random luck dictates that once in a while, government should be able to do something right.

Name that something. Name just one government program that works well and at least cost.

A massive effort is underway to link centrally organized control of jobs with centrally organized administration of schooling. This would be an American equivalent of the Chinese “Dangan”?linking a personal file begun in kindergarten (recording academic performance, attitudes, behavioral characteristics, medical records, and other personal data) with all work opportunities.

This is one case where government inefficiency is our friend. All this data already exists on all of us. It’s scattered in hundreds of databases. Government will never effectively connect all the dots. The real problem is that government will act as though it has connected all those dots and will make decisions with incomplete data.

This American Dangan will begin with longer school days and years, with more public resources devoted to institutional schooling, with more job opportunities in the school field, more emphasis on standardized testing, more national examinations, plus hitherto unheard of developments like national teaching licenses, national curricula, national goals, national standards, and with the great dream of corporate America since 1900, School-to-Work legislation organizing the youth of America into precocious work battalions

Sound familiar? The only reason that last bit hasn’t happened yet is that we have maintained historically low unemployment rates since early in the Clinton Administration. I have no doubt that next time unemployment creeps towards double digits, some sort of national jobs program, with government deciding which job you get, will be proposed.

Gatto then provides us a list of the 8 things schools are really teaching your kids.

The first lesson schools teach is forgetfulness; forcing children to forget how they taught themselves important things like walking and talking.

This was one of the great insights I had as we stared the homeschool journey. Kids teach themselves to walk and talk before age 4, yet they need government approved teachers for the relatively easy stuff after that?

The second lesson schools teach is bewilderment and confusion.

School curriculum only makes sense to school curriculum developers. The kids are totally confused. Nothing is connected from one year to the next, or even one class to the next. Everything exists in silos, devoid of any real meaning.

The third lesson schools teach is that children are assigned by experts to a social class and must stay in the class to which they have been assigned.

Increasingly, there is only one class as the schools strive to treat and teach every kid exactly the same, ignoring all those individual differences that separate us from the robots.

The fourth lesson schools teach is indifference. By bells and other concentration-destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing because some arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and aperiodically.

This is one I had never thought about before now. How often do you fail to start something because there isn’t time. Is that a learned behavior from school? If we weren’t “schooled” would it be more natural to start without regard to finish times? I definitely see that tendency in my kids.

The fifth lesson schools teach is emotional dependency. By stars, checks, smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional dependency. It?s like training a dog.

Positive reinforcement with kids is a good thing, but too much of a good thing leads to the self esteem nonsense we see today.

The sixth lesson schools teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. Good people do it the way the teacher wants it done. Good teachers in their turn wait for the curriculum supervisor or textbook to tell them what to do.

I was never real good at that waiting to be told what to do part.I remember frequently having the days work done 10 minutes into class. The instructional pattern was easy to figure out, so I usually knew we were going to be expected to do all the odd problems at the end of the chapter, or whatever. So instead of listening to the teacher drone on, I usually did the work on my own and was done before anybody else started. Back then, I never understood why that wasn’t a good thing.

The seventh lesson schools teach is provisional self-esteem. Self-respect in children must be made contingent on the certification of experts through rituals of number magic. It must not be self-generated as it was for Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford.

The kids that figure this out on theory own make lousy students. I know realize that lousy student should be a compliment!

It teaches how hopeless it is to resist because you are always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to.

And now we have a generation of kids, our future leaders, who think random backpack searches and metal detectors at the doors are normal and acceptable.

By allowing the existence of large bureaucratic systems under centralized control, whether corporate, governmental, or institutional, we unwittingly enter into a hideous conspiracy against ourselves, one in which we resolutely work to limit the growth of our minds and spirits. The only conceivable answer is to break the power of these things, through grit, courage, indomitability and resolution if possible, through acts of personal sabotage and disloyalty if not.

Is home education personal sabotage and disloyalty? I sort of like the sound of that actually.

I can’t possibly do this chapter justice here. It’s way too deep and the message is way too powerful. But since y’all are paying me try…

You are paying me, right?

Gatto makes this key point.

Starting with Everson vs. Board of Education in 1947, powerful business interests were at work in a concerted effort to drive spirituality out of the public schools.

Why? Consider these passages from the book.

The net effect of holding children in confinement for twelve years without honor paid to the spirit is a compelling demonstration that the State considers the Western spiritual tradition dangerous, subversive. And of course it is. School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of discontent upon which mass production and finance rely.

Once the mechanism is identified, its dynamics aren?t hard to understand. Spiritually contented people are dangerous for a variety of reasons. They don?t make reliable servants because they won?t jump at every command. They test what is requested against a code of moral principle. Those who are spiritually secure can?t easily be driven to sacrifice family relations. Corporate and financial capitalism are hardly possible on any massive scale once a population finds its spiritual center.

For a society like ours to work, we need to feel that something is fundamentally wrong when we can?t continually “do better”?expand our farms and businesses, win a raise, take exotic vacations. This is the way our loan/repayment cycle?the credit economy?is sustained. The human tendency to simply enjoy work and camaraderie among workers is turned into a race to outdo colleagues, to climb employment ladders. Ambition is a trigger of corporate life and at the same time an acid that dissolves communities. By spreading contentment on the cheap, spirituality was a danger to the new economy?s natural growth principle. So in a sense it was rational self-interest, not conspiracy, that drove enlightened men to agree in their sporting places, drawing rooms, and clubs that religious activity would have to be dampened down.

Simply put, spiritual, well adjusted people would never submit to their Utopian vision of the future.

Gatto also has a lot to say about the Western brand of spirituality as practiced in the US, and how it provides a model for the education of our children.

In Western spirituality, everyone counts. It offers a basic, matter-of-fact set of practical guidelines, street lamps for the village of your life. Nobody has to wander aimlessly in the universe of Western spirituality. What constitutes a meaningful life is clearly spelled out: self-knowledge, duty, responsibility, acceptance of aging and loss, preparation for death. In this neglected genius of the West, no teacher or guru does the work for you. You do it for yourself. It?s time to teach these things to our children once again.

Gatto delves further into the discipleship of Jesus Christ and how that provides a model for education, one that powerful interests have worked hard to erase. The discipleship model is based on four characteristics; A calling to follow, commitment, self-awareness and independence, and a master to follow.

It’s easy to see that forced schooling is nothing like that, and in fact is purposely completely unlike that.

it’s heady stuff, and there is more I want to say so I’m going to break this up and tackle the more spiritual side of the conversation next time.

Skinner, by the way, was a real winner.

…B.F. Skinner, that most famous of all behaviorists from Harvard. Skinner was then rearing his own infant daughter in a closed container with a window, much like keeping a baby in an aquarium, a device somewhat mis-described in the famous article “Baby in a Box,” (Ladies Home Journal, September 28, 1945).

Skinner’s influence went way beyond the schools. This concept that humans were blank slates to be programmed was the defining psychological mantra of the 20th century.

I suspect not many parents look at their offspring as empty vessels because contradictory evidence accumulates from birth, but the whole weight of our economy and its job prospects is built on the outlook that people are empty, or so plastic it?s the same thing.

Looking back at my college days – I’m starting to understand what I really studied in Organizational Leadership and Supervision. It was nothing more than applied behavioralism. My degree program may have been in the School of Technology, but when you really strip back the covers, I was a Psych major.

As behavioralism took over, it became obvious that we were all screwed up. Blank slates could not be allowed to develop in the wild. We needed trained professionals to make sure we turned out OK. The late 40′s / early 50′s was when schools started becoming more about mental health services and less about reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Reading the text “Proceedings of the Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth,” we learn that school has “responsibility to detect mental disabilities which have escaped parental or pre-school observation.” Another huge duty it had was the need to “initiate all necessary health services through various agencies.” Still another, to provide “counseling services for all individuals at all age levels.

In 1962, an NIMH-sponsored report, “The Role of Schools in Mental Health,” stated unambiguously, “Education does not mean teaching people to know.” (emphasis added) What then? “It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave,” a clear echo of the Rockefeller Foundation?s “dream” from an earlier part of the century (See page 45). Schools were behavioral engineering plants; what remained was to convince kids and parents there was no place to hide.

Looking back on my time in school, it’s easy to see this boulder rolling downhill. The end result is predictable and exactly what you would expect. Having let the psychologists take over the schools, the schools have become much concerned about kids feelings and self-esteem and for the most part, nobody cares if Johnny can read. What’s important is that Johnny is ok with the fact that he can’t read, and understands that it’s not his fault.

It can never be his fault.

Gatto tells us that several factors cumulated in the popularization of forced schooling in the early 20th Century.

• Elite society feared the wave of immigrants landing on US shores.
• In response, the upper classes formed hundreds of ethnic membership societies, many of which survive today. The primary purpose was to isolate white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from the masses of Catholics and other evils immigrating to America.
• They also formed hundreds of private schools, including most of the big name schools still in existence today.
• Darwin released The Descent of Man, which provided scientific cover for the liberal elites racist tendencies.

The root idea in all of this was to provide two primary classes. The liberal elites would continue to rule and the rest of us would “Americanized” in government school where we would learn that we were not worthy of anything beyond working for the man.

Reading through the papers of the Rockefeller Foundation?s General Education Board?an endowment rivaled in school policy influence in the first half of the twentieth century only by Andrew Carnegie?s various philanthropies?seven curious elements force themselves on the careful reader:

1) There appears a clear intention to mold people through schooling. 2) There is a clear intention to eliminate tradition and scholarship. 3) The net effect of various projects is to create a strong class system verging on caste.
4) There is a clear intention to reduce mass critical intelligence while supporting infinite specialization.
5) There is clear intention to weaken parental influence.
6) There is clear intention to overthrow accepted custom.
7) There is striking congruency between the cumulative purposes of GEB projects and the utopian precepts of the oddball religious sect, once known as Perfectionism, a secular religion aimed at making the perfection of human nature, not salvation or happiness, the purpose of existence. The agenda of philanthropy, which had so much to do with the schools we got, turns out to contain an intensely political component.

The chapter also addresses a peculiarity of American society that I had noticed on my own.

Elite private boarding schools were an important cornerstone in the foundation of a permanent American upper class whose children were to be socialized for power. They were great schools for the Great Race, intended to forge a collective identity among children of privilege, training them to be bankers, financiers, partners in law firms, corporate directors, negotiators of international treaties and contracts, patrons of the arts, philanthropists, directors of welfare organizations, members of advisory panels, government elites, and business elites.

Michael Useem?s post-WWII study showed that just thirteen elite boarding schools educated 10 percent of all the directors of large American business corporations, and 15 percent of all the directors who held three or more directorships. These schools collectively graduated fewer than one thousand students a year. More spectacular pedagogy than that is hard to imagine.

I have often wondered why so many politicians and leaders come from Harvard, Yale and the like. Having met more than a few graduates of the elite universities, I am 110% certain that ability is not the answer. According to Gatto, that answer is breeding.

The liberal intelligesta of its day set up a system, financed by Carnegie, JP Morgan, and Rockefeller, to protect the business and political interests of America’s upper class from the hordes of immigrants hitting the shores.

That system was forced schooling.